According to @VitalikButerin, the ModExp precompile is the biggest ZK-EVM prover bottleneck, making affected blocks up to 50x harder to prove than average blocks (source: Vitalik Buterin, X, Nov 3, 2025). He said Ethereum should pursue an EIP to replace the ModExp precompile with computationally equivalent EVM code, which would make ModExp operations cost more gas (source: Vitalik Buterin, X, Nov 3, 2025). He added that few applications require ModExp since it is essentially used for RSA encryption and signing, and such apps can wrap the computation in a SNARK (source: Vitalik Buterin, X, Nov 3, 2025). For traders, this highlights a concrete proving-cost hotspot for ZK-EVM rollups that emulate EVM execution, linking ModExp-heavy workloads to elevated proving overhead on Ethereum L2s (source: Vitalik Buterin, X, Nov 3, 2025; source: Ethereum.org zkEVM documentation).